We should now come back to the interaction of the living organism with the environment. We have said before that the living organism is characterized by biological autonomy but at the same time is strictly dependent upon the external medium for its survival. The interaction with the environment is structurally determined; namely, it is determined by the internal organization of the living organism. In turn, as already mentioned, such a structural determination for each particular organism is due to biological evolution, and in fact we can see the environment and the living organism as co-evolving.
At this point we can introduce the additional qualification that the environment is “created” by the living organism through a series of recursive interactions, which in turn have been produced during mutual co-evolution. The term “create” may sound forced, but it is not. It may be proper in this respect to cite a well-known biologist, Lewontin, who has been working quite outside the realm of autopoiesis. Mentioning that the atmosphere that we all breathe was not on Earth before living organisms, he adds (Lewontin, 1991, p. 109):
'[T]here is no “environment” in some independent and abstract sense. Just as there is no organism without an environment, there is no environment without an organism. Organisms do not experience environments. They create them. They construct their own environments out of the bits and pieces of the physical and biological world, and they do so by their own activities.'
Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi, The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision
